Under the Wide and Starry Sky

by Nancy Horan

Louis shook his head. “I am wondering why you take whatever I say and misconstrue it, madam. You have known me five minutes, not nearly long enough to despise me. It usually takes at least ten.”

Bob laughed, but Fanny said, “It takes leaving, doesn’t it, to see things through fresh eyes.”

Louis suspected each of them, in his or her own way, was an exile—from bourgeois values, family crests, unhappy love affairs, childhoods too long spent in church pews. He wondered if they had started as social outcasts who found the artist’s life an acceptable way to be in the world; or if their passions for painting or sculpting or writing had shaped them into outsiders. He had never been quite sure how the chicken-versus-egg question played out in his own life.

But the stories had made him different, too. They had shaped his appetite, his moral prejudices, who he was.

All the good of the woman was mixed together with the dark and bitter.

It isn’t the ideals of Christianity I disagree with, it’s the intolerance of a religion that won’t permit questions. How can you live with that? If you believe, then believe. But don’t tell me I can’t use the reason I was born with.

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

“If I seek to make a mark of my own, am I not a woman, then? Am I a monster for wanting something more? I’ve always found ways to move around the rules men make, but I am worn down by it in England. I’ll never fit the British standard of womanhood. And I don’t want to.”

If you chip away at their culture, people forget who they are.”

His little cache of Winchesters is nothing against the German or French or American cannons. When one of those countries decides he has something they want, he is going to topple. And along with him will go the identity of the people—their oral history, the legends, the songs. Isn’t that how these things work?”

It was a sad truth that while his illness had conferred on him an air of heroism, it had marked Fanny, his nurse, as a menial.

Fanny’s art was in how she had lived her own extraordinary life. She was her best creation.

“How can such a cultivated man be so appallingly narrow?” Louis asked. “It appears to be ignorance, and it is, to a degree,” Maggie said.

That’s the thinking of a man who lives in the British Museum, after all,” Fanny said. “And it’s normal for those left behind to feel abandoned when someone they love moves far away.